Basdeo Panday, former Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, came to the funeral of Cheddi Jagan in 1997, and I was delegated to chaperone him. Not ten minutes into our ride to Georgetown, he told me that he believed that there should be shared governance in Trinidad and Tobago (T&T), as according to him, his country would not prosper in the way it should unless both the Indians and African were at the executive table making the important decisions. In those days I was still in my Westminster-type need for an opposition mode of thinking, and so a healthy discourse took place for most of the remainder of the journey.
Panday might have been in that mood because he was just out of a bruising ethnic political battle that had ended in the November 1995 elections tie of 17 seats each for his United National Congress (UNC) and the People’s National Movement (PNM), and he had only been able to become prime minister with the help of the National Alliance for Reconstruction that had won two seats in Tobago. Ethnic political allegiances continue to be very important in T&T, but whether the country would have made better progress if successful efforts had been made to introduce a more consensual governance arrangement is anyone’s guess.
However, the above event always comes to my mind when persons, such as former president Donald Ramotar, – the General Secretary of the PPP, Mr. Bharrat Jagdeo, former Justice C. R. Ramson S.C., O.R, Ms. Gail Teixeira, etc. have made associated statements – invite us to ‘Take Trinidad & Tobago for instance, that country’s demographics closely approximate ours, but those questions (power sharing) never arise there. …. talking about ‘power-sharing’ as a means of dealing with the racial/ethnic issue will not work. .. it will institutionalize racism in Guyana … Guyana is not the only multi-ethnic society … None of which have the same problem created as in Guyana by the PNC/APNU.’ (Letters, SN: 26/03/2020).
That the above statements are false must be obvious to the most casual observer. While results are never ‘the same’, T&T still has a substantial ethnic problem; I have shown that similar outcomes are the norm and that a form of power sharing is the only sensible alternative (‘For Brigadier Mark Phillips,’ SN: 18/02/2020), and the current ethnic problem has persisted for some seven decades and is getting worse, so if it is not yet institutionalised when will it become so? Arguably there has not been any other five-year term of government than that of the coalition, in which the call for shared governance (SG) has been more frequent, and thus the PPP’s claim that these demands have suddenly arisen as a result of the coalition ‘losing’ the elections is nonsense. The present electoral crisis has simply focused the minds of many more people on the issue of governance and for many, whether like me they believe that the crisis should be used to solve the problem once and for all or that the electoral issue should be given priority, many contributors have come to realise that SG cannot be avoided if Guyana is to be at peace and develop.
Apart from those who are crassly opportunistic, the mistake usually made by persons such as Mr. Ramotar is that they tend to conflate race and ethnicity and are also prone towards the kind of wholesale dismissal of ethnic group dissatisfaction that the winner-takes-all majoritarian ideology facilitates. They simply do not realise that the discourse is about ethnicity that is a more substantially socially constructed concept. What constitutes an ethnic group and what it believes, how it behaves and acts depend overwhelmingly on its historical and cultural formation. Thus, voting patterns suggest that those of African ethnicity are over 40% of the population and the literature suggests that such large groups cannot be sensibly contained by majoritarian systems (SN: 27/11/2019).
Although I have long suspected that the PPP’s commitment to constitutional reform and inclusive governance falls well below the requirements, what is new and extremely alarming is that we are now being openly told by the hierarchy of the majority party that SG cannot work and that the majoritarian system is not the problem! What is that substantial group of those of African ethnicity, particularly now that they – even if precariously – hold government to do? What guarantees do they have that if the electoral quarrel is solved in the interest of either party the winner will genuinely seek to dismantle the winner-takes-all system. I am hopeful that in this the 21st century we need not descend into anarchy but are capable of finding and adopting political theories and institutions that better accommodate Guyana’s ethnic context.
In ‘Guyana is a rigging field’ (SN: 05/02/2020 & SN: 12/02/2020) I asserted that both the PPP and the PNC have over many years been manipulating elections in Guyana and have deliberately constructed and sustained a bloated voters’ register. When in recent times it dawned on the PNC that the bloat is more in favour to the PPP, it began the call for new house-to-house registration, which the PPP fought against with all its might, largely successfully. The PPP and its acolytes also mounted a campaign to convince the populace – and perhaps the elections monitors – that it was impossible for the excess on the list to be used on elections day. Since the PNC also intended to take advantage of the bloat, it could not make too frontal an objection. In passing, the Sunday before elections day I was having a drink with some friends and three women unknown to us sat at the opposite side of our table. The one who was sitting directly in front of me was going through her purse and unwittingly exposed a considerable number of ID cards, which, while looking sheepishly at me, she quickly shoved back into her bag. Of course, the woman might have been going about her legitimate business or I, with my suspicious mind, might have misidentified the cards!
I have argued that international monitors should ensure that ‘weaknesses they identify in the system are rectified or refuse to monitor elections where this is not done’ (‘How to Stop elections rigging:’ SN: 31/07/2019). The primary condition for a free and fair election is a clean list and this was absent in the 2020 elections, allowing any number of savvy actors to attempt to manipulate the outcome. Although the monitors are now trying to seize the moral high ground, it is my view that they at best again allowed themselves to be duped by these parties.
Notwithstanding this, there are those who argue that the PPP and PNC agreed to the rules and to turn a blind eye to the corrupt practices and should therefore abide by the results. What is for certain is that such behaviour has been subversive to the general social contract and particularly hurtful to the smaller parties that cannot participate in manipulating the system. However, as the saying goes; ‘two thieves make God laugh and given the PPP’s more recent stance on shared governance, brace yourself for a bumpy ride!
